


The Making of a Modern Medusa

by cassieoh, kerkusa



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Ancient Greece, Crowley is Medusa (Good Omens), M/M, Scene: Flood in Mesopotamia 3004 BC (Good Omens), Scene: Garden of Eden (Good Omens), Scene: Kingdom of Wessex 537 AD (Good Omens), Snake Hair, Snakes, Victorian
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29096991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassieoh/pseuds/cassieoh, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerkusa/pseuds/kerkusa
Summary: Ligur had tried to tell him he should put it on as soon as possible, something about the corporations getting a bit weird the longer you waited, but Crawly didn’t trust Ligur as far as he could throw him and so he decided that his snake shape was perfectly fine, thank you very much.Predictably, Crawly's choices come back to haunt him almost immediately.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 43
Collections: Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang





	The Making of a Modern Medusa

**Author's Note:**

> I had the pleasure of working from Kerkusa's absolutely amazing art and concept for this fic as part of the RBB and I couldn't be happier. Please be sure to check the rest of his work out!!

Eden 4004 BC

Despite what he’d been commanded, Crawly isn’t sure that there’s any trouble to be made or found in Eden. There is, however, a great deal of sunshine and warm rocks and a very nice young pair of humans who know all the best spots to scratch and who like telling stories. Crawly has discovered that he likes scratches and loves stories, and perhaps he’s making trouble by lying about and defining what it means to be slothful. He really isn’t sure. If it weren’t so nice, he might bring up the vagueness of orders to Dagon. But, then it might be fixed, and Crawly really doesn’t want to share Eden with Hastur or Ligur or Asmodeus or any of the rest of that lot. He doesn’t think that they’d appreciate the gentle chin scratches or warm sun the way he does. 

So, instead he says nothing, and when Hell asks how it’s all going, he tells them “Ssssswimmingly,” and distracts them by asking how the suppression of that pesky imp revolt is going. 

He spends his days winding his way through the garden, enjoying the feeling of rough soil and rocks on smooth scales and looking for some sort of trouble that might meet Hell’s standards without ruining all the pretty good things he’s decided to enjoy here. He briefly considers trying to sow some sort of strife between Adam and Eve, but the evening he plans to do so, the humans offer him a spot at their fire and show him all the interesting new fruits they found and named that day and well, Crawly doesn’t try to drive a wedge between them. He might be a demon, but he’s not a monster, and that would just be rude. 

Besides, the nights are cold, and he’s discovering that this body grows slow, lethargic, in the cold. He thinks the Garden is probably safe, but the memory of Hell is still too close to be truly comfortable with that sort of vulnerability. The fire is warm and it wakes him up, gives him his wits back, and so Crawly lingers in the bright circle of light it casts, listening as the humans tell each other stories (and hiding his head in his coils when those stories shift towards quiet whispers). 

Time passes, though Crawly has trouble tracking exactly how much of it has gone by, things sort of blur together when all your days are the same. 

One day[1].], Crawly finds himself enjoying one of the crystalline pools of water in the center of the Garden. He swims for a bit, until the water begins to chill him, and then slithers to the large flat stone on the shore, spreading himself out and allowing the warm sun to dry him. Then, when he’s entirely dry, he slips back into the water once again. 

It’s peaceful. Luxurious. 

Crawly has already decided he’s never telling anyone in Hell about warm rocks. 

He’s just surfaced from an extended exploration of the bottom of the pool[2] when he spots Eve approaching from the treeline. She’s humming as she walks, carding her fingers carefully through her long curls. When she settles on the far edge of Crawly’s sunning rock, he hesitates barely a moment before slicing his way through the water towards her. 

“Serpent,” she greets him with a smile[3]. 

“Human,” he says, hauling himself up onto the stone, just close enough that he splashes the side of her thigh. She reaches down to the pool and flicks water at him. He hisses at her, but the sun is high and the rock is warm and so he decides it’s not worth getting all wrathful-demon with her. 

They sit in comfortable silence for a bit. Eve finishes finding and clearing the tangles from her hair and leans back on her elbows. The fleshy bits on her chest move with her and Crawly thinks they look unwieldy. His form doesn’t have any of those sorts of things, and the idea that he might have to be aware of more than just where his tail is… He’s never been especially coordinated, he can’t imagine it would be better with bits flopping about everywhere. 

He tries to imagine what he might look like in a human-shaped corporation. Crawly was issued one, though he’s never pulled it from the metaphysical bubble wrap that protects it three dimensions to the right of the physical plane. Ligur had tried to tell him he should put it on as soon as possible, something about the corporations getting a bit weird the longer you waited, but Crawly didn’t trust Ligur as far as he could throw him[4] and so he decided that his snake shape was perfectly fine, thank you very much. 

He very, very carefully does not think about the other reasons why the snake form is so much more appealing. 

Crawly only has two specific memories of Heaven, the rest were boiled away by the friction of air against his being as he Fell and then sulfur in his coils as he drowned[5]. In the first, he drifts in the vast and empty void, both alone and cradled in the warmth of God’s Light. He recalls finding the perfect spot, reaching out to the places where the void met the back corners of Heaven, and pulling forth the delicate threads of helium and hydrogen, recalls weaving the stars from those threads, hanging them upon the firmament, and breathing upon them to kindle their internal flames. He recalls the way the void had warmed around the new life it cradled and how he’d felt the brush of God’s Pride in his work[6]. 

The second memory is less of a memory and more of a series of impressions; he’s lonely, he’s confused and hurting, he just wants to know _why_. His legs are shaking. He can feel the phantom tremble of his knees, the weakness in his thighs as he’d fallen to the ground and begged, pleaded for them to please, _please have mercy._

He isn’t sure he wants legs again. 

Besides, they seem like an awful lot of fuss for something that he’s sure wouldn’t feel natural on him anyway, not the same way his serpent form does. 

“Why is the sun that color?” Eve asks, startling Crawly from his thoughts. 

“What?” He cranes his head around, looking at the woman. She’s still leaning back on her elbows, though how instead of looking at him, she’s got her head tilted back as she looks up at the sun. 

She lifts one arm and points upward. 

“The sun,” she says, “Adam was going to call it something silly and long, but I don’t think it needs all that.[7]”

Crawly looks at it as well. He hadn’t helped make this one, he doesn’t think. All the stars he worked on have a bit more flair to them. This one is middling in every way, though he supposes that the ability to support life isn’t half bad. 

“There’ssss lotsss of little bitssss in it,” he says after a moment, “All running around and hitting each other. When they hit they sssshout, but their ssshoutss sssort of glow.” 

“Like a firefly?” Adam and Eve had spent an entire evening catching and releasing fireflies the first night they discovered them. Crawly had watched, amused by their simple joy, until Adam delicately plucked one from Eve’s hair and she leaned in to kiss him and Crawly felt he should probably turn away. 

“Yessss,” he hisses, “More firefliesss than have ever been. Their shoutsss have all the colorssss in them, but human eyesss can’t ssssee more than one color on top of each other like that. Sssso,” he jerks his head upward to indicate the pure white of the sun. 

Eve considers his words and then nods. 

“Thank you,” she says. She turns onto her side to face him more easily. “You’re very patient with me, Serpent. It’s kind of you.” 

Crawly knows he should hate that word as much as he should hate the warm rocks or Eve’s gentle touch on his scales or Adam’s broad laugh at his jokes. But, it’s the first kind thing anyone has said about him since he Fell and really he can’t remember anything kind being said before that. People had always admired his work, sure, but that was the things he made, not _him._

Adam appears at the edge of the wood and Crawly cranes his head around to look at him. His chest doesn’t look quite like Eve’s and Crawly thinks that he could probably manage that sort of set up. But, there is the addition of a bit that Eve doesn’t have between his legs that Crawly is less enamored with the thought of dealing with. He watches as Adam crosses the small clearing and greets Eve with a kiss and a hand at the small of her back. Then he settles at her side and smiles at Crawly and the scales around Crawly’s neck begin to itch a little. 

He has a human corporation waiting for him. 

He’d be able to turn back into a snake if he doesn’t like it, he knows he would. There are a few elements he remembers the info packet explaining are customizable, even after one breaks the seal on a corporation; hair, presentation, build. He can go for the smallest number of extra bits possible until he gets the hang of limbs. It might be fun. 

And, well, he really wants to return that smile. 

Crawly waits until the humans are distracted talking about some new thing they want to name before tucking his head into his coils to cut off the distraction of light and concentrating. 

Slipping into a human-shape is terribly easy, it turns out. He thinks about legs and arms and Adam’s chest and the apex of Eve’s legs and how much he likes the way the wind picks at the ends of Eve’s long hair and the steady strength in Adam’s shoulders and then the rock under him is cooler feeling than it had been and his curled up position uncomfortable on his suddenly short spine and when Crawly opens his eyes he discovers that he has eyelids to open. 

He blinks and sits up. The world looks much the same as it had, though it’s all a bit odd looking from this new height. He feels shaky and weird, like everything is off balance. 

Adam and Eve stare at him. Eve’s mouth is slightly ajar. Crawly lifts one hand[8] to wave, but is distracted by the color. Eve and Adam are both the color of the rich soil around them, Adam is like the fertile loam under the shade of a wide-leafed tree, there’s a cool undertone to his skin where Eve has something of the sunset about her, especially when she smiles and laughs. Crawly’s skin is pale, closer to sandstone rock they all sit upon than the soil from which it juts. He wiggles his fingers and crinkles his nose and decides he doesn’t dislike the color, even if it’s not what he expected at all. 

Slowly, he inspects the rest of his new form, poking at his feet (which still have a smattering of scales on them) and knees (pleasingly pointy, he likes his knees quite a lot), and then the little points of his hip bones where they press close to the skin. His stomach is flatter than either Eve’s or Adam’s, but he thinks that makes sense; they both enjoy eating and need to do it to live and neither of those things is true for him. There’s a silly little hole in the middle of his stomach that he spends a minute trying to figure out (neither human has one after all), but he gives up when poking it reveals no answers. His chest is flat like Adam’s and speckled with tiny reddish-brown spots just like his arms and thighs. He likes the little spots, they make him think of stars. 

Overall, he decides he’s rather pleased with the corporation. 

He starts to stand to test out this whole ‘walking’ thing, but before he can get more than halfway up, something shifts and his sense of balance cants sharply to the left, sending him toppling to the ground. Eve giggles. He glares at her from the dust and tries again. 

Again, he makes it halfway there and it’s like something within him moves and the careful sense of the world rocks on its axis. This time he knocks his nose on a particularly jagged bit of rock and hisses in pain. 

“Shit[9].”

He stays on the ground, though he does twist so he can look up at Adam and Eve. They look more right from this angle, he realizes. Adam is smiling at him, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and Eve has her mouth hidden behind her hand. Crawly has a realization about the nature of temptation as he looks at them and he carefully tucks it away, unwilling to examine it until he’s worked out how to make the expansion of his lungs not feel like it was interfering with his heart. 

His thoughts are interrupted by the tentative tickle of a small serpent tongue on his cheek. Crawly reaches up almost absently to pat the snake. He likes the other snakes that call the garden home; they’re universally a bit dim, but they’re sweet. There is a brush of scales against his fingertips and then another tiny tongue. 

And then another. 

Eve is giggling again. 

Crawly sits up to ask what’s so funny, but when he turns to look, there are no snakes on the ground behind him. He blinks at the spot, sure he’d felt…. 

The flutter of a tongue on his cheek. Crawly reaches up and grabs the snake before it can vanish again. He tries to pull it down from wherever it has perched so he can scold it for playing tricks, but when he does something goes terribly awry and he feels a sharp jolt of pain right before he’s pulled forward, only narrowly missing smashing his nose on the rock once again. The snake in his grasp hisses in pained confusion, staring at him with wide eyes. 

A terrible thought occurs to Crawly. Gently, he pulls on the snake again. There, just behind the crown of his head, he feels the pull. The snake is attached to him. He raises his other hand and, haltingly, touches his head. 

It’s not just one.

He’s greeted by a riot of little tongues, all eagerly flickering over his hand in greeting. As soon as they smell him, there is the cool tap of blunt noses pressed to him, jostling a little as they all try to get closer than each other. 

The snake still held in his hand hisses again, a clear question this time. 

“Uh,” Crawly says. Hastur has that frog and Ligur has his lizard, but those creatures can leave their heads, he’s never seen a demon with their aspect so blatantly displayed before. 

Unbidden, the memory of the smirks the other two had shared when he said he was perfectly happy with his serpent form, thank you, floats to the surface. Crawly groans. 

Corporations could get _weird_ if you waited too long. 

This is his own bloody fault. 

He pulls his legs up and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Now that he’s aware of them, he can’t stop feeling the snakes. They writhe across his upper back and shoulders. Some rise up and away from his body, causing the distinctly odd feeling that some part of him is floating away from itself. The one he’d grabbed stays close, its small head pressed against the back from Crawly’s left hand. 

“I like them.” 

Crawly looks up and blinks the spots from his vision. Eve is staring at him with a smile. She nods decisively. 

“I do! They’re cute and the color looks good on you.” Crawly inspects the one he can easily see. She’s not wrong, he realizes. The snake is a rich red with brighter scales scattered like stars across its body. When it moves the light catches on its scales, sending arcing patterns in reds and greens and blues sliding across them. There is a slim white collar around its neck, right where he’d been holding it. 

“Right, Adam?” Eve asks. 

Adam nods. “Yeah,” he pauses, looking as if something very alarming has just occurred to him. “Ah, where do they defecate?” 

Eve smacks his arm even as Crawly throws himself backwards onto the ground. The snakes move with him, and when he opens his eyes, he sees them all gathered above him, peering down and looking far too pleased with themselves. 

“Yes, hullo,” he mutters and the snakes crowd closer, overwhelmed at the joy of having been seen and greeted. Reluctantly, Crawly admits to himself that he likes the little beasts. 

“We’re going to have to work on the walking thing,” he tells them to a chorus of hisses. 

* * *

Aziraphale is rather startled when the giant serpent turns into a man. The demon says something and Aziraphale is sure he responds, though he cannot recall what he says because he is so taken by the small snakes that he seems to have instead of hair. He tries to keep his eyes on the desert whenever the demon is looking at him. To do otherwise would be unaccountably rude. But, as soon as he turns away Aziraphale can’t help but step just a bit closer. 

He waves to the snakes. 

The snakes, previously quiet and still, look at each other and then explode into motion, hissing and twining around themselves. 

This seems to get the demon’s attention because he reaches up and smooths them down, glancing at Aziraphale with flushed cheeks. 

“Sorry,” he mutters, “They’re a bit new.” 

“No problem,” Aziraphale says, and he finds that blush charming as well. What sort of demon was embarrassed by their appearance?

Then, the first raindrops begin to fall and Aziraphale instinctively raises one wing above the demon, fanning his feathers to protect them both from the cold and wet. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches as first the demon sidles slightly closer to him, and then as the longest of the snakes, the one with a little white ring around its neck, reaches up out of the tangle and touches the very tip of its nose to the edge of one of Aziraphale’s feathers before retreating once more. 

He turns back to the desert with a smile. 

* * *

1. Crawly likes ‘days’, they’re new and he appreciates that they come around with a dependable sort of regularity. A demon could get used to the warm feeling that curls in one’s chest as the first rays of sun crests the trees to the East[footnote: there’s something else to the East, something Crawly is less enthused about, if he’s being honest with himself.↩

2. There are little spiky creatures down there with what appear to be jaws where their hands should be. Crawly thinks that doesn’t seem very efficient, but then, he doesn’t have any hands at all, so really who is he to judge?↩

3. That’s another thing he won’t be telling Hell about; people up here are _happy_ to see him, and he likes that feeling, and that enjoyment gives him a strange, squirming sort of guilt. He’d tried to spin it to himself as vanity or being pleased that he was liked because that would make his job that much easier, but it had sounded false even in his own head.↩

4. Not especially far, arms were usually a prerequisite for throwing of any sort.↩

5. It’s not the Fall that kills you, goes the joke in Hell, it’s the agony of liquid sulfur in your lungs afterward. It should be noted that the denizens of Hell are not known for their ability to tell a joke.↩

6. In him? It’s a thought that worries him, that he hates. How can he still treasure the idea that She might once have been proud of him?↩

7. Of course, she was not saying this in English, but the exact language that was spoken in Eden has been lost to time.↩

8. He has hands!↩

9. It will occur to him only many years down the line that his first word spoken with a human mouth was a curse. He will not tell Aziraphale because that just feels like asking for a lecture about how he’s really just set himself up for all the strange bad luck that seems to follow in his wake.↩


End file.
